True, the elves didn't come in the book. But I think for the movies, PJ needed to emphasize that - yes, the elves were fighting and dying too. Since everything was already quite confusing, showing an elvish battle somewhere completely different wouldn't have worked. I'm not completely mad about what he did.

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tindomerel wrote:

Well...first of all, I don't think any one here should belittle what Peter Jackson did with the LotR movies.

Well, I suppose my opinions may be considered "belittling" PJ. There were parts that were fantastic and spot on, like Strider's face lighting up from inhaling his pipe at the Prancing Pony, and the whole look and feel of The Shire. The casting for the most part was good, and the Ruins of Eraiador and the Mines of Moria looked great. Where he stuffed it up was in cutting out the whole part about the Dunedain of the North and the Rangers and the Sons of Elrond riding south to aid Aragorn. If he wanted to bring Arwen into the main part of the tale, that would have been a perfect time. I could of accepted her accompanying her brothers and the Rangers and being a fighting lady-elf as a screenplay change. And if he wanted to get Haldir and the Lorien elves into the fight, they could have rode to war in aid of Gondor.

I am rambling on now about some small and simple changes PJ Boyens and Co. could have made that would have made these films much better and even more acceptable to us old time book fans. PJ had so much and was making yardage, but he fumbled the ball before crossing the goal line. Just my humble opinion on this. These movies could have been great, but now the story is crying out for a reboot.

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As I own and have read (multiple times) Humphrey Carpenter's "The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien", I know how ballistic JRRT went about the first proposed movie treatment of LoTR by HollywooDUH! We could have done a lot worse than (now Sir) Peter Jackson. But because he got so much right, I may be overcritical of him when he just totally blew it, as he did at (too many) times. I mean, in the Extended Editions, there's Tom Shippey, one of the JRRT scholars extraordinaire, who could have cleared up PJ's mind-muddles from memory instantly!

I mean, we saw FoTR in early January 2002 here in Germany, just after its premiere here. I think it might have been a Wednesday. We saw it again three days later on a Saturday because I realized I had spent the first viewing of the movie, all almost three hours of it, compiling what turned out to be a massive list of what differed from the book (Frodo is not 50 like Bilbo was at the beginning of The Hobbit etc. etc. etc.) But by then I had read the book more than a dozen times, so red flags for "wrong!!!" went up for minor details (and I do not miss Tom Bombadil, he was an anachronism in the book, too).

Joined: 25 September 2015Posts: 193Location: In front of Isengard with Merry, Pippin, and the Three Hunters, talking over recent adventures!Country:Gender: Female

Hanasian wrote:

I still think one of the best scenes in the movies is when PJ takes an arrow in the EE RotK.

I my word yes!!!!! Bro, same!

But yeah,there were a lot of things I wanted to kill Peter Jackson for, and this is one of them. The whole getting to helms deep and Gandalf being like, "No! You should just charge the orc ranks and blast them into smithereens." was unnecessary conflict and it didn't really make sense for them to do that anyway. As I recall, in the books, Gandalf said, "yeah,ok, that's cool" and then went around the countryside orchestrating the logistics of beating Saruman. Making a huge deal out of being outnumbered was fine, but why bring the elves in just to kill them ALL off? All lots of thousands of them died . That just doesn't even seem plausible that a lot of the men survived but none of the elves did. Elves are better at fighting than men are, right? It worked a lot better in the books, and they could definitely have just stick to the exact plot line with this one. I don't feel like forgiving him for it.

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Last edited by Héalic on December 11th, 2017, 2:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Joined: 25 September 2015Posts: 193Location: In front of Isengard with Merry, Pippin, and the Three Hunters, talking over recent adventures!Country:Gender: Female

I wanted to kill him throughout the whole movie Aragorn's fall off the cliff, Arwen leaving Aragorn, the elves showing up at helms deep, and most importantly, FARAMIR. MY FAVORITE CHARACTER THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH COMPLETELY BUTCHERED.

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